Ixnay on the Ed Bullray...

This past Friday evening, I took a cab with my friend Sameer from Libertine to Parlor around 1:00am. This was stupid because, generally speaking, most places in LA, including Parlor, stop letting people in around 1. In any event, Sameer's roommate was there, so it was a trip we had to take to meet up with him. I had never met the roommate before. If you tied his arms to a tree branch and drew and quartered him for 3 hours, he might pass for 5'5'' but I think I'm being generous. If you threw him in the pool before weighing him, he might pass for 125 lbs. The point here being he is not a threatening presence by any stretch of the imagination. Sameer and I get out of the cab and immediately there is this ultra-aggressive presence before me. I was sporting a Dodger cap and this self-proclaimed Los Angeles "gatekeeper" confronts me by asking in an almost offended manner, "Why you wearin' that cap, brah?" "What do you mean?," I ask. "You a fan or something?" "Yes," I say. "Oh, okay." And then he moves on. What the hell is that? I couldn't for the life of me figure out what was going on in this douchebag's head. Apparently with his Jack and Cokes he also downed a serious dose of LA pride and testosterone because he was looking to pick a fight with anyone who had anything negative to say about the City of Angels. Unfortunately for Sameer's roommate, it was him on this night. The poor kid was discussing with a friend how he preferred New York to LA. I don't particularly agree with the opinion, but a crime it is not to express it. Now the roommate was unaware that the guardian was on the prowl. The guardian overhears the conversation and approaches. "You got a problem with LA?" "It's no New York," was the reply he got. That apparently constituted provocation to this lunatic because he wound up and socked Sameer's roommate across the jaw, tackled him and a brawl ensued that had to be broken up by security. Now, I've seen people fight before over some pretty stupid shit, but I have to say this was by far the most retarded. The aggressor in this case was over 6 feet tall. He punched a puny little guy in the face over what he deemed to be an affront to his city. He almost started with me over wearing a Dodger hat, presuming that I wore it specifically to mock him and his love for LA. No amount of alcohol can explain this bizarre behavior. This is the result of severe mental imbalance, severe insecurity and just downright stupidity. Mr. Gatekeeper of Los Angeles, please stay in your cage this coming weekend. I'd hate to see how you'd react to a 5 year old wearing a Laker jersey. I'll bet his mother dressed him in it just to mock your man-love for Kobe. Your insanity is unrivaled my confused friend. You're gunna spin right off this planet. Keep up the good work.

Say Hi To My Mother For Me... Because I Can't Talk To Her

It is not uncommon for a guy to argue with his mother when he's growing up. This seems to be a rite of passage, the way of the world even. I have been arguing with mine for years now. When I was in middle school it was over the right to go out on Halloween night with some of the neighborhood, baggy-pants wearing riffraff, throw eggs and toilet paper at houses and spray shaving cream on smaller, unfortunate young'ns. When I was in high school it was over getting caught drinking in my basement, staying out past curfew or sneaking a girl into the house. When I was in college it was over mismanaging my money, overdrawing my account, and devoting too much time to fraternity life over studies. As I grew up, the issues about which we would argue became more adult in nature, the stakes got higher and the need for parental guidance greater. While I always had my guard up and defended even the most reprehensible actions, even then I knew when I was wrong and I knew when she was simply being a good mother. I don't need to look retrospectively at the situation to tell you I was a snotty kid who deserved to get yelled at. I knew I was but I couldn't help myself. I was wrong in probably every instance in which I fought my mom as a kid. Now I am, for all intents and purposes, an adult. I have made it, I can stand on my own two feet and I owe a lot of that to my mom. We no longer have to argue about all the childish bullshit I pulled as a kid. Yet, I find we have an entirely new topic about which to argue now and it is the last one I ever would've expected: Politics.

My father is a staunch democrat, always has been since the 1960's and he passed this sentiment on to his only son. I am by no means a bleeding heart liberal. I don't think the government should hand out welfare to idiots whose only accomplishment in life was figuring out how to fuck and make illegitimate children they can't afford, let alone raise. I don't think that every government dollar should go toward incentive programs and handouts for those who took no part in earning it. As a recent LA resident, I think illegal immigration has gotten out of control. I also think that to some extent, health care is a personal responsibility. However, I believe that America, as a democratic society, has some obligations to its citizens. It is not, in my opinion, anti-American to believe that those with the most means should contribute a little extra to help those less fortunate than themselves. Think of it as government mandated philanthropy.

Republican ideals, at this juncture in American history, seem to revolve around excessive government spending for highly unnecessary things for the average American taxpayer, most notably a military conflict (hard to call it a war without a legitimate enemy in uniform) in a barren wasteland with a fractious people. Yet John McCain, who believes we may need a significant presence in Iraq until I turn 124, is criticizing Barack Obama for being an excessive spender and a proponent of socialism. This is very funny to me and I will address why in more detail in a moment.

Republican ideals also seem to revolve around deregulation of any and all industries. The republican mantra has essentially been "Go with god." They didn't want to tax corporations, they didn't want to preclude them from shady practices, they didn't want to get involved at all. Just as long as Halliburton (21 million in losses for the 3rd quarter!) got that next big contract, Dick Cheney was happy. So lenders started lending to people who shouldn't have qualified for a loan for electronics equipment, leave alone a mortgage, at absurd loan-to-value ratios all because some financial whiz-kids on Wall Street created some abstruse financial instrument which got a computer to say "$500,000 mortgage with no money down for a low income family is a safe bet!" Wall Street shined shit and called it gold. Greed prevailed because everyone looked the other way. So now we have utterly obliterated credit markets, plummeting property values and consumers tighter than a virgin's honeypie. All this is creating the irrational fear that is causing the Dow Jones Industrial Average to see if it can go as far below sea level as New Orleans' 9th Ward. These companies are not actually doing anything to lose value, investors just fear that it's all going to hell in a hand basket. We can thank the unregulated Credit Rating bureaus who initially approved all the bad loans for the big banks and then turned around and dropped their credit ratings more notches than Al Roker dropped on his belt size for this seemingly indomitable irrationality.

So now we have big spending on a failed military conflict with an, at the time conjured, but now very real enemy and a collapsed economy which has caused President Bush to do what he does best: instill fear! If we didn't get behind the bailout, he said, everything would crumble and we'd suffer an economic nuclear winter. I'm not questioning his judgment, just his approach. The bailout may very well have been absolutely necessary. But fear-mongering, as he did to muster support for the Iraq war, is such a pitiful way to get people's attention. Regardless of the necessity of the bailout and the way in which it was presented, it is a socialist policy and that is undeniable. Let's call a spade a spade. This administration, which was so careful for 8 years to privatize profit, has now made the public responsible for the debt. So, who's the socialist? If this is okay, why not a little socialism for health care? Why not a socialist work program to create green jobs and promote energy independence? Why fear that Barack Obama is going to do something that Franklin D. Roosevelt did in the 1930's and the republicans of today are already doing? These are all questions which I have yet to get a legitimate answer for from my mother.

My mother is a Jewish woman, born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. She works for the New York City Board of Education and earns a teacher's salary. This is a demographic that I can assure you is largely democratic and, by largely, I mean 100%. Yet somehow I was birthed by the one conservative nutjob in the bunch. I am not one for throwing my mother under the bus. As Eminem so eloquently put it, "Now I would never dis my own mother just to get recognition," but this a circumstance that I just find very hard to swallow. She voted for George W. Bush in 2000. She voted for George W. Bush in 2004. And now she is primed and ready to vote for John McCain in 2008. Sometimes I wonder if the two of us have been living in the same country for the past 8 years, let alone how we are related by blood. My mother believed that George W. Bush has had her best interests at heart for the past 8 years and that John McCain does too. She has no idea what the republican party actually stands for. This has mainly to do with the fact that her only source of current information is Fox News, and Sean Hannity in particular. She ridicules and denounces the networks I watch including CNN, which is the most unbiased network of all, as being the "liberal mainstream media." She sounds like Sarah Palin which is another story altogether.

So each day, I get another e-mail from my mother about ACORN, or Bill Ayers, or Reverend Jeremiah Wright to now the latest development, the turncoat motherfucker from Philadelphia who is suing Barack Obama, claiming he is not a natural born American citizen. Everything my mother has ever brought to my attention as to why she is against Barack Obama has been to do with smear campaigns and pure conjecture about a shady past which have no relevance in choosing a person to lead the country. She is blinded by fear, and unconsciously (though she would never admit it) a latent racism that stems from a public school education in Brooklyn at a time when her neighborhood, Canarsie, rapidly turned from all white faces to virtually none is the blink of an eye.

I frankly do not care if every single rumor about Barack Obama is true so long as he possesses the wisdom and the demeanor to lead us out of crisis and make this country better. That is what an informed voter should base his/her vote on. To date, my mother hasn't given me a single reason as to why John McCain would make a better president than Barack Obama. All she can say is Barack Obama "cavorts with terrorists and traitors," "the terrorists around the world want him to win," "he's going to make this country a socialist republic," and "he's going to raise my taxes and redistribute the wealth to the poor." These are all the outcries of the ignorant and the severely misinformed. They are irrelevant arguments to me.

All I see is a confident middle aged man who can speak to the American people like no politician in recent history, who can keep his cool under pressure and who has intelligence far superior to the average man. When I look at John McCain, I see a severely weathered, bitter, old man, who has a fiery temperament, a penchant for anger, but most importantly a man who represents the party that is responsible for the majority of the problems this country now faces. I respect the fact that he served our country in war and feel badly that he was imprisoned unjustly, however I fail to see this as a qualification for president. There is no experience that can prepare anyone for the office of the president. What matters is the President's ability to adapt to situations, think rationally and compromise, all things I think Barack Obama will be better at, independent of all the other reasons why the republicans deserve to be ousted from power.

If the government does not fear the electorate, then democracy is broken. One party cannot fuck everything up for years on end and continue to be rewarded with reelection. That isn't how it's supposed to work. It would seem the reason it has worked recently is that there are some extremely evil geniuses out there such as Karl Rove and Rupert Murdoch who are masters of spin and masters at getting low information voters, like my mother, to vote against their own economic interests time and time again. The republican party has done this mostly through the fabrication of social wedge issues, such as abortion and gay marriage. Dumb hicks in Alabama who cling to their hateful religion vote for a candidate nowadays because they'd rather see a guy in the White House who claims he's going to get Roe v. Wade overturned (never gunna happen) than a guy who is going to fight for the economic success of the middle class. Other uneducated, American voters who aren't necessarily so keen on the social wedge issues are being dissuaded from voting for Obama because of all the fear tactics. This is evidenced by the ignoramus who stood up at a McCain rally and said she couldn't trust Obama because he's an Arab. Others are chanting "Off with his head," and literally "Kill Him!" This is a country that no one should be proud to live in after comments like that.

To recap, in the past 8 years we have seen our country go to war with a country that had nothing to do with the attacks of September 11th. We have watched several thousand soldiers die needlessly in that godforsaken desert. We deposed a dictator who, while horrible, was a secular leader and the fear he instilled kept his people in line, preventing the chaos our army has now come to know. Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, he merely wished to maintain the perception that he did so that Iran would not invade, something they will surely do now if we ever decide to leave Iraq. This means we essentially cannot leave unless we want to suffer the wrath of an evil juggernaut far worse than Iraq could ever have dreamed of being. We have not caught Osama Bin-Laden and let the war in Afghanistan fall by the wayside because, well, Afghanistan doesn't have anything we want and it's not in the region we wanted to spread democracy in so we don't care. We have done nothing to stop the genocide in Darfur for pretty much the same reason. We did nothing to save the people of New Orleans from the disaster that was Hurricane Katrina for a very similar reason. The No Child Left Behind policy is a bankrupt policy that, in effect, does leave children behind because it forces schools to lower standards to meet quota. We have virtually no science and math education and no one trying to take up a career in science research or engineering because getting into the Wall Street greed game has seemed a far more attractive career path to bright young men and women... until now. The economy has collapsed because there was no regulation or oversight imposed on any of the major banks, or financial institutions.

On every front, from the economy to education, from foreign policy to domestic, the republicans and the Bush administration have failed miserably. And the reason to give their party four more years to fuck it up even worse is??? I can think of really only a few and they are all ugly words: Fear, Racism, Bigotry, Ignorance, Stupidity. This means that my own mother, the woman who bore me, is operating based on one or more of these reasons and it makes me very, very sick. There is no reasoning with her. Obama is a socialist, he's a Black Panther, he's an elitist, he's this, he's that but god forbid he's a good candidate for president. God forbid a time may have finally come when this country can actually get over itself and its ugly past and elect an African-American man to be our President, not because he's African-American but because he's the most qualified candidate and the best choice for the betterment of our country.

Last I checked, the polls say Obama has a healthy lead and over 270 electoral votes through a combination of states either solidly in his corner or leaning his way. This is a breath of fresh air but it is by no means the endgame. I still have fear that people are saying they will do one thing to sound like a worldly citizen but when push comes to shove they will lend credence to their baser instincts. I guess I will get back to you about it on November 5th. In conclusion, I have learned to simply love my mother for all the good she has brought into my life and try to forget that she has absolutely no idea what she is talking about when it comes to politics and be thankful that she lives in New York where her vote won't count.

Homeless Is Where The Heart Is...

Hello all,

For my first entry I have decided, rather than introduce myself or give a long-winded background tale of my travels and adventures, to simply share with you some of the amazing encounters I have had with the homeless/insane of the County and City of Los Angeles.

I am from New York, so I am no stranger to the homeless problem. The fundamental difference here in LA however, is the sheer mobility of its bums. In New York, the residentially challenged population tend to focus the majority of their efforts on finding warmth. They find a grate, a manhole, anything on the sidewalk recessed from the street that emits warmth and they plant a stake like an Oklahoma Sooner. They stay there and they don't dare move because finding another one may prove difficult. In LA, the bums just wander. They traverse long distances up and down wide streets all day and all night it seems. Warmth is not nearly as much of a problem in sunny California as it is on the eastern seaboard. This is all fine and dandy, however by traveling all day long they tend to come in contact with the general population and, by affiliation, me, more often than the lovable bums to which I am accustomed. I admit homelessness is a dreadful problem and I by no means am an insensitive, heartless demon, but I don't think anyone can deny that sometimes the homeless do absurd things on account of being homeless and thereby going totally insane. Some of these absurd things are bound to make people laugh, namely me. Please enjoy:

1.) I was walking home with my roommate, Zach, and our friend Aaron from Baja Fresh on Wilshire and Curson, near my apartment on a Sunday afternoon. In the distance we heard an extremely loud outburst. We turned around and noticed a hobbled black man in tattered clothing laboriously pushing a shopping cart. He was traveling at a distance of 10 ft. per minute. This had more to do with the fact that he was stopping at every passerby and shouting obscenities at the top of his lungs than the fact that he walked as if someone had shoved an industrial sized elbow pipe up his ass and turned it left some 30 years ago. Perhaps his snail's pace was due to a combination of both. Conventional wisdom tells one to simply ignore the man and keep walking. That wisdom was duly noted and ignored as we stopped dead in our tracks and waited for him to come closer. We still could not make out the words, just the fact that he was shouting loudly at unsuspecting pedestrians. Each time we heard another scream, laughter erupted among us as it is not everyday you hear people yelling in the streets. Finally, he got close enough for us to ascertain the man's astute social commentary. "FAGGOT!!!," he announced angrily as an elderly couple passed him. At this point we were rolling. We fought to contain the laughter because we were within this nutjob's field of vision. He was rapidly approaching, hurling his homosexual slurs at cars as well as people at this point. We turned the nearest corner so as to let him pass us. This was ill-advised. As soon as he crossed the street, he decided to stop. Now the politically correct vagrant was standing between us and our apartment. He turned around. Despite being bat-shit nuts, he was aware enough to notice us. He stood staring at us for a solid minute and a half. We stared back from across the street. It was a standoff on Wilshire and Masselin. Finally, he put his hands on his hips and proudly exclaimed "FAGGOT!!!!" Then he walked off into the distance. The day was clearly his as he had asserted his claim over the sidewalk for a moment in time. We let him have his pride and we walked home once he was naught but a speck in the distance.

2.) I was on the LA City Bus Rapid 720 riding to work at 8AM on a Monday morning, as I do every morning to get from Miracle Mile to my office in Brentwood. On this particular morning, also patronizing the bus was a soot encrusted crazy on his way to the VA hospital. I didn't even notice him at first, as I tend to look at the ground or out the window while riding public transit of any kind. But then he did something a little unorthodox. I was about to put on my headphones and drown out the dull roar of the diesel engine and the clickety-clack of Espanol with some killer Little Weezy tracks when all of a sudden there was an announcement: "WINCHELL'S!!!" Apparently this old fool wanted some donuts. But then he got presumptuous: "Errybody goin' to Winchell's." No sir, I'm just going to work, you may go to Winchell's if it pleases you, though. He continued: "Yeah, yeah, they ahh... they ahhhhhhh..... (losing his train of thought right about here) .....WINCHELL'S!!!" What was most shocking to me was that none of my fellow riders did so much as crack a smile. I suppose it was better that way because it made it easier for me to suppress my external laughter and simply chuckle on the inside. This behavior was repeated at every stop. The exact same one-sided conversation was rehashed verbatim at Fairfax, La Cienega, Robertson, Beverly, Santa Monica, Beverly Glen and Westwood. I mustered a lot of self restraint to avoid laughing in this poor soul's face.

3.) I was standing on line to get into Happy Ending on Friday night around midnight with Zach and my friend David. There was a homeless wearing old sweat pants cut at the cuffs, a t-shirt that looked like a tiger had swiped it's paw across the front, and a bandanna reminiscent of a Tupac video loitering nearby. He was smoking a cigarette which was obviously given to him by some charitable bar patron. Someone on line behind me must have provoked this gentleman simply by standing online and wearing clothing that wasn't torn to shreds, because the next thing I knew, the transient was in this unfortunate soul's face, threatening to knock him out. Strangely enough, at this moment, the psychotic bastard was pissing himself. That's right, the aggressor, not the victim, was urinating himself silly. He walked off for a moment. He threatened a few more customers intermittently. Finally, the security staff of the bar told him he needed to move on. Apparently harassing one customer was within the bounds of accepted practices but once he soiled himself he had crossed the line. This loony tune then blindly walked into Sunset Boulevard traffic and, by the grace of god, made it halfway across to the double yellow line only to come face to face with an ambulance on its way to an emergency. The ambulance prudently slammed on the breaks so as not to create a second emergency. The man stared into the windshield of the ambulance as the ambulance driver and passenger stared back at him. No one was budging. A small eternity passed. Someone on line at the bar shouted "Tiananmen Square!!!!" Everyone waiting chuckled heartily. Then the freak faded into the darkness whence he came.